– – – a chronicle

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, who recently toured several South American countries told reporters of his concerns that today’s drug smugglers will possibly become tomorrow’s terrorist weapon suppliers.

Dempsey, as quoted by the Washington Post, said, “It’s both the narcoterrorism activities that we see destabilizing our southern border (and) it’s that network itself that can be used for other purposes — and probably will be.” The Army general theorized, that because the drug smuggling network “can move anything (that will) go to the highest bidder…looking to the future, it’s certainly in our interest to do what we can to help the nations in this region to break those networks” so they cannot become weapon supplying networks used by Islamist terrorists.

The general continued, “We learned how to defeat al-Qaida by attacking the network along its entire length…The question here would be, can we take the same paradigm in how to attack a network,” but do this with the cooperation of South American nations. General Dempsy visited military outposts in Columbia and Brazil to discuss the deployment of US soldiers to act as “military advisors” to host country’s armed forces.